Storming the ‘Ex-Gay’ Shores

In 1998, 15 religious right organizations launched a huge advertising campaign to promote “pray away the gay” programs. Anti-gay activist Robert Knight called the “Truth in Love” campaign the “Normandy Landing in the larger cultural wars.”

Things didn’t quite work out as Knight had hoped. In 2000, I photographed their poster boy, John Paulk, in a Washington, DC gay bar. In 2003, I joined attorney Mike Hamar in reporting that the star of their television campaign, Michael Johnston, was hooking up with men he was meeting on the Internet.

The already shredded credibility of such groups markedly deteriorated this year after Exodus International’s leader, Alan Chambers, said that his “ex-gay” ministry did not work for 99.9% of clients. This followed a similar admission from Love In Action ministry leader John Smid. The icing on the cake occurred this spring when Dr. Robert Spitzer renounced his infamous 2001 “ex-gay” study claiming that some gay people could go straight.

The cherry on top of the icing came last month when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting reparative therapy for minors in California, which greatly damaged an industry where more than half of the clients are youth.

This week, the rest of the chickens came home to roost and the roles from 1998 were reversed, with the LGBT community and its allies storming the beaches of the “ex-gay” shoreline.

On Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a lawsuit on behalf of the victims of reparative therapy. Representing four clients, and two of their mothers, SPLC slammed Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), its director Arthur Abba Goldberg, and life coach Alan Downing, with an historic complaint alleging consumer fraud.

SPLC’s lawsuit is based on JONAH and Downing’s “misguided and erroneous belief that that being gay is a mental disorder – a position rejected by the American Psychiatric Association four decades ago.” The lawsuit says that some Plaintiffs were instructed to “remove all clothing during both individual and group therapy sessions including an instruction to Chaim Levin to hold his penis in front of Defendant Downing.

If the SPLC action weren’t bad enough for the “ex-gay” industry, Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s will introduce the “Stop Harming Our Kids” (SHOK) resolution on Wednesday at a Capitol Hill press conference. Though not as strong as a federal bill, which is sorely needed, it is a terrific step in demanding that unethical charlatans be held accountable for malice in the guise of medicine that often exacts psychological wreckage on young clients and their families.

These pushers and peddlers of guilt and shame have pretended to be experts, when they are just extremists and ideologues taking advantage of desperate and vulnerable people. Every mainstream medical and mental health association in America rejects so-called reparative therapy, including: The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The American Psychiatric Association says that attempts to change one’s sexual orientation can lead to “anxiety, depression, and self destructive behavior.”

According to a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, LGBT teens who experienced negative feedback from their family were 8 times more likely to have attempted suicide, 6 times as vulnerable to severe depression, and 3 times more likely to use drugs (Caitlin Ryan, San Francisco State University, June 2009). Reparative therapy divides families in the name of family values, which can sometimes lead to the “negative feedback” that causes LGBT youth to harm themselves.

Still, the snake oil salesmen blithely ignore these potent warnings because they are not concerned with the mental health of youth. They disregard facts to peddle fiction and engage in wishful thinking that they cynically refer to as therapy. Homosexuality has not been considered a mental illness for forty years. Yet, these opportunists magically claim that they can heal people who are not sick and fix people who are not broken.

Such therapists mislead ‘patients,’ deliberately misrepresent science, and dangerously play head games that can cause lasting mental scars. They engage in consumer fraud because they offer promises they can’t deliver, while delivering disasters they never promised. America’s youth deserve better than to be pawns in an ignoble effort to profit from the pain of hurting parents who are falsely led to believe these quacks are genuine experts.

As the author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, I have seen the enormous destruction caused by reparative therapists. As the founder of Truth Wins Out, one of the nation’s primary watchdogs of the “ex-gay” industry, I have had to pick up the pieces of shattered families and littered lives.

This scam can’t be ended soon enough. While no one has transformed from gay to straight, there have been too many people who have gone from whole to hurting, or from alive to dead. It’s time to end this ugly nightmare before more peoples’ lives are destroyed.

About the Author

Wayne Besen is the Founding Executive Director of Truth Wins Out and author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth” (Haworth, 2003). In 2010, Besen was awarded the “Visionary Award” at the Out Music Awards for organizing the American Prayer Hour, an event which shined a spotlight on the role American evangelicals played in the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

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5 Comments

Michael BarberNovember 28, 2012 at 9:45 am -

When 90% of the so-called “reparative therapy” is being doled out under the guise of “religious counseling” which is covered by the First Amendment, how do you get rid of that? Religion in and of itself is nothing more than a scam on the public. Why are our federal tax dollars being used to perpetrate this scam on the American people through State block grants and the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives? Ask your President why this continues when you meet with him next.

Michael AirhartNovember 28, 2012 at 10:19 am -

I don’t believe the First Amendment protects for-profit commercial activities, regardless of whether they include a religious motive. If the First Amendment did apply to commercial activity, we would have no protection against other forms of consumer fraud.

I agree that the White House should be confronted over its waste of taxpayer dollars via fraudulent faith-based initiatives, especially at a time when we face drastic budget cuts to vital and well-run programs.

Katie DavisDecember 1, 2012 at 9:21 am -

Mr. Barber, I whole-heartedly agree we should surely continue to inspect the motives and actions of all “faith-based programs” that are supported with taxpayer dollars to ensure they are not proselytizing, but rather offering only social services with no “faith requirements” attached.

We should, of course, push for a ban on these damaging so-called “therapies,” but I am concerned that the ban on so-called “ex-gay, reparative therapies” will only drive them further underground into “religious counseling” or “pastoral counseling” within protected religious domains. I repeat your concern: How will we be able to protect children within the protected walls of religion? Mr. Airhart rightly notes we have a hook if these programs are for-profit, but I truly fear for those youth who are well-hidden within a non-profit “church.”

One more note: Using federal dollars for faith-based programs was initiated by a Bush administration, not by MY President (yours as well – while the “W” made it clear he was not the president for any gay citizen!) I think President Obama would be very open to continued close-watch of federally supported “faith-based programs” while Mr. Bush and his cronies “looked the other way” as SOP.

Mike AirhartDecember 1, 2012 at 3:13 pm -

I see nothing wrong with driving remnants of a malpractice-based industry underground.

If “ex-gay” programs confine themselves to non-profit religious domains, then their parent churches will be held accountable — in the courts and in the media — for the sexual abuse, and family breakdown that ex-gay programs (being inherently sinful) facilitate.

Religious affiliation does not protect oneself from accountability, nor should it allow one to sin with impunity.

One cannot drive this industry underground — because it already IS the underground. This is an industry of quacks practicing consumer fraud that is already far outside the mainstream. NARTH’s complaint is an example of the pot calling the kettle quack.

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Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights the "ex-gay" myth and antigay religious extremism.

TWO monitors anti-LGBT organizations, documents their lies and exposes wrongdoing. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for truth, integrity, and equality for sexual minorities.